Backups

Built a static, backend-free demo of the Loupe cull UI, untangled an edited-render pull that reported success while writing nothing, fixed an importer that choked on Live Photos, and reorganized all my project notes into one place.

The whole project finally lives somewhere other than my one machine: I pushed a private backup of the repo. Then a small but careful change to how the app resolves edited renders so it stops statting thousands of network files on every restart, plus a power-outage readiness check and a move of my project notes vault out of the folders iCloud sweeps.

I merged Loupe's pipeline repo into the app repo as a subtree, untangled a code-vs-data path coupling that would have quietly broken everything, and then (right before the first push to a private GitHub repo) ran a full-history audit that came back dirty. It found a home address, GPS coordinates, and a dump of my home network's internal layout buried in old commits. The rest of the day was rewriting history to purge all of it, normalizing my commit identity, and collapsing everything to a single clean branch.

A wide day: shipped a dormant glass redesign and a fully responsive header, chased a stats box that kept clipping, root-caused six photo-pairing mis-binds down to a filename suffix, sorted out the faithful way to pull edited photos, relocated my notes vault, and ran a security review I'm keeping vague on purpose.

The day Loupe stopped being a thing that only runs on my machine. I reframed it as a self-hostable product, made the pipeline portable through environment variables, scrubbed both repos clean for publishing, finalized a brand and header, fixed the photobook's repetition problem, and registered loupeculling.com for a marketing site.

The day the project got a name and a spine: I came back to a box that had silently rebooted, merged two sibling photo-review apps into one productionized service called Loupe, added a cloud backup and AI-written period summaries, and built an enrichment layer that joins Apple's own labels, people, and scores back onto my library by UUID.

A long day: turning a 462 GB copy into an instant rename by understanding the filesystem, catching two backup processes about to trample each other, and building two browser tools to actually review ~91,000 photos without ever deleting one by accident.